With that as the context, I reproduce the text of the essay I had emailed to the members without any edits or changes. Including the P.S. & P.P.S. but without my e-mail signature. ;-)

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Politics comes from the root word 'polis', which is the Greek word for City State. Actually related to Sanskrit & Tamil words 'pur' or 'puram', other words like Metropolis, Police also come from the same root word.

If the archaeologists and scientists are to be believed, we humans have been on the face of the Earth for nearly 2 million (20 lakh) years now, roaming around quite a bit in search of game and food, but it is only the past 10,000 years or so that we started settling down thanks to the advent of crop cultivation and animal husbandry. Even most mythologies agree to the pattern if not the timelines.

So instead of making temporary shelters we started building more permanent abodes, roads/streets, drainage, etc. and slowly villages sprang up, mostly along river banks. But it took many more years before we started living in cities, next to people whom we did not know as well as when we used to live in settlements in tribes. When we lived with our tribe alone a lot of things were taken for granted and there was inherent trust. Of course there were rivalries even within a clan, we are an aggressive species, but there were many others whom the rivaling faction respected and held in high regard and thus they were able to diffuse the situations many a times without violence. To be able to diffuse a tension required tact and wisdom, which is obviously available with the elders in a society. Thus strong ties are very important and integral to our social fabric.

There is a limit to the number of people we can intimately know, but apparently for a proper social structure we need to know how each of those intimate relations are related to each other too. Anthropologists have actually studied the brain cavity volume in the skulls of fossils as well as modern man and other primates and figured out that there is a correlation between the size of the brain and the number of people we can know intimately. A larger brain meant a larger tribe. We modern humans can apparently, on an average, not have more than 152 close relationships (though the minimum & maximum estimates range from nineties to low 200s). This is called the Dunbar number.

But we do not form strong ties alone with people, we often have acquaintances, old friends, etc. whom we can call upon at times of need. They form our weak ties. And social technologies these days seem to be very well adapted to help us maintain these weak ties very well.

While the weak ties helps us get things done in the face of resistance and what economists call as market friction, the very fact that the Cities have now grown larger than a tribe brings in the market friction in the first place. While commerce helped us to collaborate across borders, it was these strong and weak ties that usually helped remove the market frictions.

A large city also necessitated the need for a governance model. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, wrote ta politika"affairs of state," a book on governing and governments and it is indeed from this title that the word politics apparently is derived from. While we have seen various forms of government forming, growing and collapsing over the millenia, we are not yet done with its evolution. For while the Earth has existed for nearly 4,600 million years, life on Earth for nearly 4,000 million and man a mere 2 million years, governance came only very recently, not more than 10,000 years.

But Governance is mostly policy making. The execution of it depended upon armies of executives who were probably the main reason why alphabets and numbers got a written form. Our ancient wisdom was transmitted orally. The vedas, puranas, etc. were not written down for many centuries. But we did need the written form for governance - of property & commerce. For cities needed money to function and taxation was the only means to fund the cities. Taxation meant measuring and recording. Ditto for tenders and procurements.

Now, while the formation of Cities, governments and executives was for the common good of all, man has many fundamental flaws in his design/evolution, which are what make him the 'animal'. And every philosophy & faith identified them as sins or undesirable traits that needed to be overcome by oneself. That which was conducive to the social structure was regarded as virtue or desirable traits that was to be the ever present goal of a human being. The primary quality every faith advocates is love, which encompasses a lot of other virtues like trust, helpfulness, charity, etc.

But, man being man throws a spanner in the larger scheme of things all the time. A society being such a complex mechanism, sometimes all it takes is a few people to do a few things here & there and a large catastrophe is perpetrated. This is the political manifestation of his innate corruption. Forms of corruption vary, but include bribery,extortion, cronyism, nepotism, patronage, graft, andembezzlement. And to achieve these corrupt needs does one resort to chicanery, the use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose.

This is a universal phenomenon, not limited to any particular group or race, and thus there are means to check these. Primary of these is a written law or codified rules which explicitly limit the powers entrusted to the governing bodies. While concentration of powers is the first step to enable governance, explicitly limiting them is of paramount importance too. However, no set of rules or laws are good unless there is a system of accountability. And accountability is both in the design as well as the culture of the government body.

The most important question now then becomes how to inculcate a culture of accountability in the EC and the Office Bearers, which is the governing body for our association? While the powers have been entrusted for a smooth functioning, limits have also been set in the Bylaws of the association. The very fact that this first set of office bearers and the EC has not even a year to operate should be reassuring to the members, since elections are a means of enforcing accountability too. The habit of constantly sharing the deliberations and decisions taken as well as an update on the status in the spirit of being transparent is an added overhead for the EC & OB who are sacrificing their work & family life for the betterment of the society. But they do it, because it is habits that form culture when shared by many. And it takes a long time & a dogged effort to create habits, let alone culture.

Accountability is enabled by transparency, however too much of transparency hinders the pace of work and the time & efforts involved too. Asking transparency to be the goal rather than accountability is nothing other than sophistry, the use of fallacious arguments, even if with no harmful intentions. While the advent of technology has given newer capabilities, the problems that need to be solved are age old and require many levels of solutions. And while technology is a great enabler for the early adopters, it is important to take along the whole community together, which might necessitate taking them step by step towards a required state from the current state they are in. Technology needs to be inclusive, not exclusive, but when new systems are being put in place, perforce we need to be cautious about its roll out and try to bring in the various levels of users turn by turn.

The elders in the society who have bestowed us with their wisdom and acumen towards legal, accounting/financial and auditing requirements need to be considered as do the near illiterate labourers & security guards on the ground with respect to the processes & systems first. Without which the technology, with which we middle aged members are so comfortable, makes no sense and only will cause a wider rift between the haves and have nots.

As an office bearer I can only submit to you our inability to progress faster, however, we do so not in sloth but because of unfamiliar territory and the fear of setting wrong precedents, for what we do now might, unbeknownst to us, become part of the culture of future EC & OB and hold the future to ransom.

Sincere regards,

Prem

P.S.: Sorry about the long essay, but even this has taken me nearly two hours to draft. A shorter one would take nearly a day.

P.P.S.: The intention is not to ridicule anybody, faith or race. Neither did I intend to be condescending. If however, I have transgressed in error, I seek your kind pardon in advance. The sole intention of my long post was to request patience and help with the way things are progressing and evolving, not disrupting it at this early stage.

I thank you for the inspiring, albeit compulsory, speech today on the occasion of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan's birth anniversary, hitherto called Teacher's Day or Shikshak Diwas, being observed as Gurutsav.

You do bring out a key concern with today's Education which is so focused on memorizing facts/information and mastery over certain specific skills and not on critical & holistic thinking. And you implore the teachers to be the care givers and role models for the children that will make them the able citizens for future India.

Mr. Prime Minister, there is an urgent need to help the teachers learn the very aspects you ask them to impart. Teachers today are generally ill equipped to practice critical thinking on their own. And given the rapid changes in the technology and economy in our country, the rift is widening in the quality of the teacher training being provided. I implore you to focus on improving the curriculum and quality of these teacher training institutions. Without an understanding of the developmental needs of the children and their various sensitive periods in which they pick up a life skill the teachers unwittingly do much harm than help. Help them to learn about these aspects.

Mr. Prime Minister, I am also deeply disturbed that you have made it very conspicuous by omission, the daunting task of protecting our environment. The responsibility of safeguarding Mother Earth and its voiceless denizens. This thought is disturbingly absent also in the way the environmental affairs are being conducted in the new regime. Bio-diversity is as important as, if not more than, mere green cover, and maintaining it should be of our prime priority, if not increasing. Without a sensitivity towards the nature the children will grow up to build even more powerful machines and infrastructure that only gouges the Earth rather than replenish it. Pro development need not mean anti environment.

Regards,
A concerned father

Gartner's Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies, 2014 | Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2819918

"The most successful business man is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good and grabs the new just as soon as it is better."

Source: Why we should rethink school desks

"A principle of repression that amounts at times almost to slavery has a firm grip on both schools and education.

A proof of this may be found in the use made of desks and seats to match. Here we may see a striking examples of the mistakes made by earlier materialistic educators who stumbled badly in their efforts who use the scattered stones of science to rebuilt the crumbling walls of the school. Children were formerly seated on long, dreary benches, then science came along and perfected the desk. Al the discoveries of anthropology were drawn on for this task. The age of the child and the length of his legs were used to determine the right height for the seat. The distance between the seat and the desk itself was calculated with mathematical precision so that a child's back might not become curved. Then, finally, with a really profound insight, the desks were separated from each other and made so narrow that once a child sat down he could not stretch himself from side to side or move close to his neighbor; and the desk itself was so constructed that a child could be seen as far as possible in all his immobility. The hidden motive behind all this separation of the children was to prevent immoral actions in the classroom, even in kindergartens! What should one say of such excessive prudence in a society wherein it would be scandalous to teach principles of sexual morality for fear of corrupting the innocent? And yet we have science here lending its support to this hypocrisy by building machine-like desks. And this is not all. Complacency goes still further. Science has so perfected the desks that they guarantee a child's immobility, or , if one prefers, spare his every movement. Everything is so arranged that, when a child is firmly fixed at his desk, he is forced to assume a position thought to be conducive to his health. We find seat, footrest, and desk so arranged that a child cannot stand up. But then, when the seat is tilted, when the top of the desk is raised and the footrest turned up, he has just enough space to stand erect.

This is the way in which desks have gradually been perfected. All experts on the so-called "scientific system of education" have a model scientific desk. Not a few nations are proud of their own national desks, and their various refinements have won them patents and awards.

Many sciences have doubtlessly contributed to the construction of the desk. Anthropology has provided the measurements of a child's body and described the natural characteristics of his age. Physiology has explained the movements of a child's muscles. Psychology has described the precocity and perversion of instincts. And child hygiene, above all, has prevented curvature of the spine. The desk was, therefore, scientifically constructed according to the data furnished by anthropological studies made upon children and has thus furnished us with an example of a literal application of science to the school.

But it will not be long before there will be a change in this attitude in every country where there is a revival of interest in the welfare of children. In the face of so much progress made in the first decade of the twentieth century, it will seem to be incomprehensible that so many students of child hygiene, anthropology, and sociology did not bring to light the basic error of the desk.

It will not be long before people will run their hands in amazement over these model desks or look at pictures of them and read the reason given for their construction, hardly trusting their senses.

The desks were adopted to prevent pupils from getting curvature of the spine!

And yet these same children were subjected to such a regime that even if they had been born healthy their spinal columns could have become twisted and they themselves humpbacked! And this could have happened to the spinal column, which, biologically speaking, is the most primitive and essential part of the skeleton, the main support of the living organism! It was something that could stoutly endure the fierce struggles that engaged both primitive and civilized man when they fought lions in the desert or hunted mammoths or quarried stone and bent iron and extended their dominion over the earth. And yet this spinal column cannot stand up but bends under the yoke of the school!

It is incomprehensible that "science" should have perfected an instrument of slavery in the school without being in the least enlightened by the thought and efforts given to the creation of a free society.

Everyone knows the direction that has been taken by this reform. The poorly-fed workingman does not ask for tonics but for an improvement in his economic condition that will help him to heat better. The miner, who must work for many hours a day stretched out on his stomach, can easily rupture himself, but he does not ask for a truss. Instead, he looks for shorter hours and better working conditions so that he can lead an ordinary healthy life like other men.

And if during this same period of social reform we find that children are working in such an unhealthy environment in the classroom, and won so opposed to their normal development that their very bones become bent, we find an answer to this sad condition is an orthopedic desk.

Sometime ago a woman with obvious satisfaction, imagining that I approved of all of these scientific innovations in the schools, asked my opinion about a brace which she had invented for school children to complement the protective features of the desk. Physicians, as a matter of fact, have various means of treating curvature of the spine; orthopedic instruments, braces, and traction, that is, the periodic suspension of a child by the head or shoulders so that the weight of his body stretches and straightens the spinal column. And now that someone has suggested employing the brace, it will not be long before someone advises traction for the pupils!

All of this is a logical consequence of the material application of scientific methods to a decadent system of education. The same could be said of the use of anthropology and experimental psychology in contemporary schools.

The rational way to prevent scoliosis in children would be to change the type of work they do so that they would no longer be obliged to remain for many hours a day in a harmful position.

What the schools need is more liberty, not such a contraption as a desk."

It seems like every brand has become obsessed with real-time marketing.

Everyone wants to be Oreo at the Super Bowl, but let's be honest - it's not that simple. 

Your content programs were likely built for a slower moving time, not today's "always-on" pace driven by social conversations.

Want to get ahead of the trends and uncover how real-time insights from social data can drive your content? 

We wrote this whitepaper to explain what it takes.

Please read it and let me know what you think. 

"If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat."

Map of the Internet, like our brain.

“Imagine you are looking at Planet Earth from the Moon. Imagine nerves running all over spherical Earth. Notice human minds like dots pulsating and sending signals between them. Some nerve connections are bold , some are dotted. Some minds are emitting a lot, some nothing, some in-between. Some nerves have lots of noise/resistance/signal loss, some are flowing smoothly and rapidly like cholesterol-free arteries, some in-between.”

Sandhya - a Sanskrit word for dawn, dusk or joining. A time of change. (Shot by me at Mathigiri, Hosur)

“It is an accepted cliche in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn. I always saw value in that, sure. But in my mind the better number one goal was this: I wanted to help students learn to judge themselves.

Did they recognise their true abilities? Did they have a sense of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others viewed them?

In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve – as Coach Graham taught me – is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse? ”

• ways to motivate people to share (please/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection)
• ways to make it simpler to share (time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine)
• different triggers to share (facilitator, spark, signal)

• the awareness a person can have about oneself from the data the systems capture these days, and also help them close the loop by seeing how the data moves by taking certain actions (actionable insights for the individual)
• storytelling to go with the data, because people understand stories better than data (A good article on storytelling: http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/18/the-big-pivot-part-3/)

Thali

"... a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds."

"My boyhood in India was an exquisite blend of contradictions. Schoolmates from several religious faiths, languages, ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic groups and cultures played together happily, enjoying each other’s festivals and food, revelling in their differences.

If my new home, Australia, can be described as a ‘melting pot’ of cultures, then my native land of India is best described as a ‘thali’. A large plate, served with a vast variety of delicious, different foods, different colours, textures, flavours, spices and temperatures — never to be mixed but savoured slowly and individually as part of a complete, satisfying and fulfilling feast."

"Corporate leaders — and especially large company CEOs — are finally realizing what their employees and customers already know: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers, and even with their own employees enables their companies to be more adaptive and agile."

Source: McKinsey Global Institute Report

"Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises."

- The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

Hotlinked from Brian Vellmure

"To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves."

“Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people”
— Peter Sims in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

"No matter how often expert predictions fail, we want more. ... So we look to experts. They must know. They have Ph.D.s, prizes, and offices in major universities. And thanks to the new media's preference for the simple and the dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel. And so we convince ourselves that these wise men and women can do what wise men and women have never been able to do before. Fundamentally, we believe because we want to believe."

Source: Oatmeal Shop

• replace the huge IT infrastructure which was setup at the turn of the millennium, mostly to combat the Y2K scare. That's a decade old and bleh when compared to what you use at home.
• build new enterprise applications that leverage the benefits of these newer systems but for the same old business needs, lets call it SMAC Mimicry (Inspired by this Gartner blog post about Feeling & Thinking Digital)?
• build new consumer applications, this is like SMAC Mimicry above, but to try & lure customers to spend more, not to co-create value. Like iTunes for example, but only by leveraging the basal wirings of human brains, think gamification (questionably good for the person) or social media triggered release of hormone oxytocin (the moral molecule, probably good only for the in-group, not just about anybody belonging to the humanity). Both are not really required for the benefit of humanity or the consumer like for example Ushahidi, but that's yet to find an enterprise use though extremely useful for humanity. Lets say we call this SMACification?
• or atleast modernize legacy applications, put client-server or web apps for desktops on cloud and build mobile interfaces ... say, SMACization?

Source: Waiting for the night shift

"Outsourcing is a risky business and finding a trust worthy vendor usually needs help from others who have worked with those vendors. It also helps if the vendors have built credibility at an industry level. Social Media is a valuable new way to find these credible vendors.

Whereas in the traditional approach industry analysts played a key role in vendor selection, social media is augmenting them with new sites like LinkedIn where professionals can reach out to their peers in the industry whom they might not even have known otherwise. New services like Ombud.com, which lets users create RFPs and vendors bid on, aims to challenge the established analyst firms when it comes to vendor evaluation guidance by leveraging crowdsourcing or the wisdom of the crowds.

These are early days yet and the time tested methods of building credibility via analyst relationships, authoring white papers, speaking at industry seminars, publishing case studies, etc. still hold good with social media forming yet another channel where these activities are extended to."

Social Media outsourcing doesn't readily belong in the direct customer interaction aspect of it, and certainly not for the real time/synchronous interactions with the customers - like on Twitter. Asynchronous interactions though could be considered. Most certainly the back end stuff.


...


Automation isn't sufficient yet & humans don't scale for cheap. Hence a mix of automation (sentiment analysis, routing, assignment) & offshoring could help.


Further, even if considered for interacting with customers on social media, the issues with "accent" pollution faced in call center offshoring need not enter the equation by restricting the responses from offshore teams to written & asynchrnous content which could go through reviews to reduce errors.


But the real deal with outsourcing &/or offshoring Social CRM is in consulting, redesigning the business processes to incorporate social media into the current customer centric processes (BPX), designing the IT infrastructre/architecture, developing, QA & implementing the various social apps as well as the integrations with the traditional CRM systems, training & documentation, support & maintenance of the apps - the whole bunch with the backend stuff.

From Gartner's blogs

• Speaking about technology, social media/web 2.0 is not really complex when considered as a mere additional channel (cross channel is a different ball game BTW). And thus it was easily implemented by 2010/2011 (3rd highest priority in 2010).
• The real problem with ‘social’ comes when it has to be used in the context of work that happens in any organization as well as the deluge of data that we get from these channels
• Hence leveraging ‘social’ in workflows as well as making collaboration more social will be of higher concern for people who already have implemented and want to derive business benefits (4th highest priority in 2012; highest in 5 years)
• Hence, big data, HANA, BI/DW, etc. would be deeply impacted by the addition of this extra channel (which correlates with 1st & 3rd highest priority)
• Companies have taken a plunge into social waters, and have been experimenting for the past 2-3 years. Now is the time to get serious and ask the adult questions of business benefits/impacts and returns. Lessons from the experimental usage must educate the process of drawing up a strategic intent, cutting across the organization. This is more a business/strategy process rather than technology implementation.

Systems of Awareness: Helping humanity understand itself better, via computers.

1. about others, 
2. about how others perceive us and 
3. about how others perceive/behave with each other. 

Source: Spiegel.de

1. social design, social modeling, that is thought up front, at the strategy level, rather than as a feature or a layer, post facto
2. social that incorporates the meaning of societal - values, humanity - into the vision of the organization

"Every industry, every type of business we think about needs to be fundamentally reinvented in the face of social. Social isn't a type of layer you slap on after the fact--it needs to be part of the product at the point of inception."

"George misunderstands the shift with the social web. ... Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures."

Source: i* wiki

"The concept rests on the premise that both economic and social progress must be addressed using value principles. ... businesses have rarely approached societal issues from a value perspective but have treated them as peripheral matters. This has obscured the connections between economic and social concerns."

Source: HBR Big Idea - Creating Shared Value

Assange vs Zuckerberg

Source: scorpfromhell

• Open Standards that have been born and developed at IIW – OpenID, OAuth, Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, Salmon Protocol, SCIM, UMA ….
• The Federated Social Web
• Vendor Relationship Management
• Personal Data Services -  collection, storage and value generation
• Anonymity Pseudonymity and Reputation Online (think google+ controversy)
• Legal Innovation including, Information Sharing Agreements, Data Ownership Agreements and the development of “trust” frameworks.
• NSTIC – the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (it uses the term “user-centric identity” 4 times & “citizen-centric identity” once)
• Cloud Identity and the intersection of enterprise ID and people (consumer) ID.

A huge part of identity on the web is controlling who can see what: think about the Google+ Project’s approach, where your identity consists of a series of data objects (posts, photos, status updates, etc), each having its own set of access controls. Controlling access to items requires that you have people to restrict access with. Therefore, contact and relationship management is integral to digital identity.

Source: Wikipedia